The Day It All Started

Every mention of Barry Bonds in the national media - and Lord knows, that's every fifteen minutes - reminds me of my very small role in the unfolding steroid scandal in Major League Baseball. I've alluded to it in this space before, but after watching Bonds get the full Roy Firestone treatment in his interview with Jim Gray this week, I figure now's a good time for the story.

August, 1998. I was about eighteen months into my gig in Bristol, working primarily as an anchor for ESPNews. 24-hour news networks, like Fox News, CNN, or ESPNews, are predicated on filling all those hours with new information, a challenge vastly different from a "scheduled" news program like, say, "Sports Talk Live." File that away for a moment.

On this particular day - August 21, 1998, a Friday - I was assigned to the afternoon shift, co-anchoring a three-hour block from 4pm to 7pm. All of us in the newsroom, like all baseball fans in America, were captivated by the Great Home Run Chase: Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. McGwire was at 51, Sosa hot on his heels. It was the biggest story of the summer. Further, it was great TV. Sports networks covered The Chase the way CNN covers an election. Loads of content, updated hourly.

That afternoon, as we were writing our scripts for what was usually a pretty boring shift, a story crossed the Associated Press wire, written by one Steve Wilstein. The slug read as follows: "Drug OK In Baseball, Not Olympics." You know the deal. Wilstein, an AP reporter, had seen a bottle of something called androstenedione in Mark McGwire's locker, done some homework on it, and concluded that this was newsworthy. Which it was - to a point.

Pretend, for a moment, that it's 1998. Jose Canseco, Congressional hearings, Rafael Palmeiro's finger, Barry Bonds - none of that has happened yet. Try to imagine. The reality of that August day eight years ago was this: an AP writer wrote a story about Mark McGwire using a supplement, one that was not only legal in baseball, but available at your local health food store. Yes, it was already banned by the NCAA, the NFL, and the Olympics - but given that the NCAA and the Olympics were already burning athletes for using allergy medication, that comparison was sketchy at best. Andro's connection to anabolic steroids was still unexplored. Based on what we knew at that moment, McGwire was taking the equivalent of a protein shake. That was the reality of 1998.

Now - what would you do with that story?

Here's what the coordinating producer in charge of my shift did: he announced that we were dumping our entire rundown and leading our show with the McGwire story. He was adamant.

I was adamant, too - adamantly against it. To repeat: at the time, andro was not a banned substance in baseball. It was perfectly legal outside of pro sports. I wasn't at all surprised or bothered by the fact that McGwire took something to help repair muscle tissue. My CP, on the other hand, wanted to spend the first hour of our show "breaking" the story that Mark McGwire was taking something that anybody could buy at the mall. A brief discussion ensued - one might call it an "argument" - and as one might expect, the anchor lost. We re-wrote the show. As far as I could tell, my co-anchor and I were the first in the national broadcast media to cite the AP story. On Friday, August 21, 1998, we were unwittingly at Ground Zero, right next to Steve Wilstein.

Kaboom.

Everyone remembers the fallout. The Cardinals threw a fit over the Wilstein story. Tony LaRussa called it "an invasion of privacy." McGwire held an impromptu press conference at his locker a day or so later, claiming that everybody he knew in baseball used the stuff, or something similar to it. Within weeks, the andro story simmered, pushed off the front page by the storybook battle between McGwire and Sosa, while Wilstein was vilified by many of his own peers. By the time Big Mac was hugging his son after number 62, with a grinning Sosa applauding from the outfield, baseball had successfully buried andro.

Years later, we get Canseco's book, and the hearings, and the wagging finger, and Barry Bonds. And here we are.

It's easy to argue that we were ahead of the curve by harping on McGwire's use of andro, but that conclusion can only be drawn with the benefit of eight years of hindsight. Truth is, it was dumb luck, the equivalent of Peter Vescey throwing ten NBA trade rumors against the wall in a column and crowing about the three that stick. At the time, given what anybody knew, the news value of "McGwire uses andro" was highly debatable.

The better story, then and now, is baseball's stubborn insistence on burying its head in the sand when it comes to performance-enhancing substances. In 1998, the home run chase between two of the most popular players in the game drove attendance through the roof, sent TV ratings skyrocketing, and erased the memory of the humilating cancellation of the World Series only four years earlier. Baseball was enjoying a renaissance, one punctuated by dollar signs. Nobody wanted to rock the boat. It took a scathing memoir from a previously unreliable source - Canseco - and the tragicomedy of Congressional hearings to finally force baseball to draw the curtain. That's embarassing.

I still can't figure out why Major League Baseball's front office gets a hall pass relative to the treatment that Bonds and McGwire currently endure. The players weren't doing anything wrong - not by baseball's rulebook at the time. Rafael Palmeiro is now a pariah, but Bud Selig has a new contract. And as an aside, the economic gap between haves and have-nots in baseball has never been wider. I don't get it.

Anyway, I was there, in the delivery room, the day the andro story was born. Interesting day.